Emmys rating up overall, down in demo

ABC's telecast averages 13.2 million viewers Sunday

The Primetime Emmy Awards were no match for football on Sunday, but the kudocast gained in overall viewership from last year while slipping among young adults.

Sunday’s Emmys telecast, in which Showtime’s “Homeland” and ABC’s “Modern Family” emerged the big series winners, averaged a 3.8 rating in adults 18-49 and 13.2 million viewers overall, according to preliminary Nielsen estimates adjusted for time-zone differences.

The demo score is down about 10% from last year’s 4.2 on Fox and matches the 2008 show on ABC as the lowest-rated Emmy telecast on record among young adults. Holding up better among older viewers, though, this year’s kudocast gained about 800,000 total viewers from last year (12.4 million on Fox) and topped three of the previous five Emmy shows.

ABC estimates that roughly 31 million people watched at least six minutes of the Primetime Emmys kudocast, which was hosted by Jimmy Kimmel.

Reliable half-hour numbers weren’t available Monday, but prelims suggest that the show appears to have peaked in the opening half, which featured awards for populist comedy and reality programs; the second half was dominated by awards for lesser-watched dramas and movies.

This is the third straight year that the Emmys benefited from airing on the West Coast both live at 5 p.m. and tape-delayed at 8. Because the commercial inventory remained the same in both showings, Nielsen produced a cume number of unique viewers for Los Angeles, San Francisco and other Western cities.

The Emmycast pulled a national overnight household rating/share of 9.3/15, including a 14.1/20 in New York, a 13.8/21 in Chicago and a 9.7/18 in Los Angeles.

At NBC, the Baltimore-New England “Sunday Night Football” contest – a playoff rematch and an exciting game not decided until the final seconds – averaged a strong 8.1 rating/20 share in adults 18-49 and 19.8 million viewers overall on the net’s stations from 8:30 to 11. And these numbers will go up nicely in the nationals since the prelims don’t include the highly rated final 45 minutes of the game.

In Nielsen’s overnight metered-markets, the game registered a 38.3/54 in Baltimore and a 37.1/56 in Boston.

The late-afternoon CBS game (Houston-Denver in many markets, Pittsburgh-Oakland in the rest) earned the day’s highest NFL overnight score (14.9 rating/27 share); action didn’t wrap until a little after 8 p.m. ET.